Elefante

My opinions regarding 'Elephant' are somehow mixed. Okay, so I knew beforehand that the film was going to be about a shootout in a school. So that may have influenced my opinion but on the other hand if I did not know this, would I have sat through the entire movie? I ask this because the first hour drags. The cinematography is good and at times the viewer feels like a stalker or a fellow student observer. 'Elephant' takes place during the day of the shoot and the director gives us a glimpse of the lives of some of the teenagers but none of them were particularly interesting and Van Sant has adhered to using clichés such as portraying the 'nerd', the 'loser', the 'popular one', the 'bulemic girls' etc. Some questions I want to ask: Is it really that easy to get hold of such a high profile weapon, that too, delivered at your own doorstep? Van Sant doesn't directly give the motivation behind the student who decides to massacre the students although he does hint bullying and teasing as a possible motive. The shooters had to be repressed homosexuals? Why was it necessary to show them as homosexuals? I think many have liked it for the shock in the final thirty minutes but what I would have rather liked to see was a story about what causes young teenagers to take drastic action or what was going through the minds of students when this happened (which is what I thought 'Elephant' was going to be about). I like 'Gus Van Sant' as a director but in my humble opinion 'Elephant' is far from his best work. However, after seeing the film, it did get me thinking of the real life incidents that happened and the innocent lives that were lost. So, it would be wrong of me to say that 'Elephant' was a complete waste. It's not horrendous. It just could have easily been far better.

Imagine it: A horrific tragedy has taken place in a local school, the violence and inexplicability of which has stunned everyone who has heard of it. A meeting is announced that will address the issues that such an event has raised. At the meeting, the main speaker takes the floor, stares at his audience for a few long seconds, then shrugs his shoulders and mumbles "S**t happens". What? You ask. That's it? "Well," he says, "you can't expect me to provide YOU with the answers. But I did take some nice photos".

That's "Elephant".

It would be hard to tackle such a topic without sinking into "Movie of the Week" territory, so Van Sant avoids this by sitting down and not doing much of anything. But artfully.

Why was this film made? What does it tell us about the events? That they happened. What does he tell us about the victims? Nothing, absolutely nothing. We follow them around, interminably (I feel I knew the backs of their heads intimately, if nothing else) and it's a lot like reality tv -- dull: uninvolving, unrevealing and uneventful. What does it tell us about the perpetrators? Nothing we don't already know, haven't already read. Insights? None. It exists in its own universe, blank and unfeeling, a perfect circle, Art for Art's sake.

As far as it goes, there are some beautiful touches, here -- the overlapping time frames, the slowing down of the action to signify a small, private, joyful moment -- but Van Sant bottles out on taking them anywhere, afraid as he seems to be of taking a stand, making a statement or engaging, emotionally, in any way with anything here.

All in all, an Artsy and pointless exercise in navel-gazing, one that masquerades as something much deeper, and hopes its own silence and blankness will be taken for wisdom.

Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" is what critics claimed it to be - an observation. The film strains very hard from any bias and undue sentimentality. It seeks to create a distanced atmosphere of void allowing the viewer to fill it with his / her emotional or intellectual reaction.

Does it work? In maintaining his distance Van Sant succeeds admirably, faltering only once or twice, satisfying some distasteful or satirically exaggerated high-school cliche. For instance, the camera follows three clearly popular girls, all concerned with their diet, through the lunch line in the cafeteria to the table where they have an empty and inconclusive discussion about the meaning of friendship (this is not the problem) and wander into the bathroom and synchronize vomiting behind closed stalls (this is). While there are, doubtless, instances of such behavior in all high-schools, the scene seems like a forced joke, irony shoved down the throat of the audience. Still, these shortcomings are few and far between. Most of the film consists of unfinished, meandering conversations and meandering people, wandering in and out of focus of the observing camera, which traces its way through a Portland school on one fall day. It does so, portraying the school life with solid realism, focusing on a few characters who experience this life differently.

However, these variegated experiences fade into meaninglessness when Columbine-style violence breaks out and the characters, known and anonymous, are shot by two boys. Van Sant's implication, objective camera observation or not, is clear in the way he tells his story. Whatever these kids that we meet experience is rendered meaningless by the violence, equally meaningless, that comes to end them. We are left with tragedy, questions, and shock. "Elephant" achieves this emotional resonance quite well precisely through its merciless observation, its refusal to preach and to sentimentalize the events it portrays.

Nonetheless, I think that "Elephant" should not necessarily be judged by its lack of sentimentality and bias. In an somewhat exaggerated comparison, "Elephant" feels a little like Van Sant's remake of "Psycho," shot for shot. Here is a film which is an attempt at a recreation of something like that which happened at Columbine in the course of one day, without the media and social baggage that came afterward. (Michael Moore dug into that). Its goal is exacting realism, its method strict self-discipline and austere self-restraint. And Van Sant leaves us with a haunting picture of school violence. So what? Yes, he manages to shed a lot of the embellishments with which society and the media have adorned school violence, but it leaves us with very little. The meaninglessness of the violence is self-explanatory as is the ordinariness of the day on which the violence occurred, until it occurred.

Van Sant does not blame the media, videogames, or rock-music (though videogames feature in the film more prominently than media, while there is a total absence of rock-music). He just shows us what happened. I think the problem is not that people didn't know what happened, but utilized events like Columbine to attack things they hated about society, to push censorship, or to oppose gun laws, to push for education, or oppose lax security at schools. Columbine created a forum for many bubbling issues and offered a chance at scapegoating. It warned of the growing alienation of high-school kids (which the film depicts reasonably well), while signaling of a much-deeper crisis emerging within our society. While I think that Michael Moore's "Bowling For Columbine" is a film hardly without biases and agenda (something that is to be treasured in "Elephant), it attacks that second, more prominent problem much more successfully. Columbine exposed many contradictions within schools, homes and in the the much larger social and political arenas.

"Elephant" is a film that expertly portrays alienation of its subjects and the meaninglessness to which they are reduced by the violence that breaks out. And, while I do not oppose but praise its restraint, "Elephant" says far too little to be watched again and again, or remembered for a long time.

This movie is a fictional story, but it is essentially a retelling of the Columbine High massacre. It only spans maybe an hour in time, but it coves the points of view of a lot of people, from victims to bystanders to the murderers themselves.

It's a particularly important piece because of its storytelling style. Van Sant has the camera follow one character at a time, on the day of the murders, and lets the story tell itself. It is about as neutral as one can get, really. Van Sant doesn't use foreshadowing, he doesn't frame any character up as a particular archetype, he doesn't play ominous music, and the dialogue is about as inane and high school-ish as you can get, very realistic actually. There are no jokes, and relatively few scenes designed for maximum shock effect. That's the whole point: the situation was a normal high school day, and the very events, regardless of how you paint them, should be as shocking as anything. All the while you're asking yourself, "How can this possibly lead to a massacre? These are all normal kids," which faithfully recreates the tone of morning leading up the unexpected real life events.

If you're looking for a conventional movie with a clear beginning, middle, end, good and bad guys, glorified heroism and demonized violence, you won't like this movie, it's not a made for TV special, it's closer to an art film.

Some people have expressed anger at the movie, accusing it of some sort of liberal Michael Moore anti-2nd amendment sympathies or heavy handed preaching. Having seen it I can't possibly understand what they're talking about. My suspicion is that they're seeing what they want to see. And that leads me to wonder just what a good movie about Columbine would look like, in their opinions. To me, this is it.

A refreshing film that was so simple that all of the complicatedness of the motives was so simply explained, and it worked. Not to mention the cinematography and lengthy shots were amazing. Also, from a 52 year old man, I expected worse of high school student dialogue, but boy was I surprised. Being in high school myself, I completely was convinced of this being actual high school dialogue, perhaps because much of it was improvised. I just cannot describe my feelings after watching the movie, like when most finish great films. It was realistic and simple, yet went to levels of insanity.

p.s.--the sound design was absolutely fantastic